Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (15 page)

‘Sorbert; I understand you. Do realise that. There is no necessity for all this rigmarole with me, if you think you shouldn’t marry—why it’s quite simple! Don’t think that I would force you to marry!
Oh
no!’ (the training guttural unctuous accent she had in speaking english filled her discourse with a dreary mechanical emphasis). ‘I always said that you were too young. You are far too young.
You need a wife—you’ve just said yourself about your feeling for marriage—but you are
so
young!’ She gazed at him with compassionate half-smiling moistened look, as though there were something deformed about being
so
young. It was her invariable habit to treat anything that obviously pointed to her as the object of pity, as though it manifestly indicated, on the contrary,
him
. ‘Yes, Sorbert, you are right’ she finished briskly. ‘I think it would be
madness
for us to marry!’

The suggestion that their leisurely journey towards marriage was perhaps a mistake, was at once seriously and with conviction far surpassing that he had ventured on taken up by her. Let them immediately call a halt, pitch tents preliminary to turning back: a pause was essential before beginning the return journey. Next day they would be jogging on again in the same disputed direction.

Tarr now saw at once what had happened: his good words had been completely thrown away, all except his confession to a weakness for the matronly blandishments of Matrimony. He had an access of stupid brief and blatant laughter.

As the earliest Science wondered what was at the core of the world, basing its speculations on what deepest things occasionally emerge, with violence, at its holes,
*
so Bertha often would conjecture what might be at the heart of Tarr. Laughter was the most apparently central substance which, to her knowledge, had uncontrollably appeared: often she had heard grumblings, quite literally, and seen unpleasant lights, belonging, she knew, to other categories of matter: but they never broke cover.

At present his explosive gaiety was interpreted as proof that she had been right. There was nothing in what he had said: it had been only one of his bad fits of rebellion.

But Tarr was ashamed of this backsliding into humour, that fatal condition: laughter must be given up. In some way, for both their sakes, the foundations of an ending must be laid at once.

For a few minutes he played with the idea of affecting Bertha’s weapons. Perhaps it was not only impossible to overcome, but even to approach, or to be said to be on the same field with, this peculiar amazon,
*
without such uniformity of engines of attack or defence. Should not he get himself a mask like hers at once and follow suit with some emphatic sentence? He stared uncertainly at her. Then he sprang to his feet. He intended, as far as he could see beyond this
passionate movement (for he must give himself up to the mood, of course) to pace the room.

But his violence jerked out of him a resounding shout of the most retrograde laughter. He went stamping about the floor roaring with reluctant mirth: it would not come out properly, too, except the first outburst.

‘Ay—that’s right! Get on with it, get on with it!’ Bertha’s patient irony seemed to gibe.

This laughter left him vexed with himself, like a fit of tears.

‘Humour and pathos are such near twins that Humour may be exactly described as the most feminine attribute of man—and it is the only one of which women show hardly any trace! Jokes are like snuff, a slatternly habit’ said Tarr to Butcher once ‘whereas Tragedy (and tears) is like tobacco, much drier and cleaner. Comedy being always the embryo of Tragedy, the directer nature weeps. Women are of course directer than men.—But they have not the same resources.’

Butcher blinked. He thought of his resources. Then he recalled his inclination to tears.

Tarr’s disgust at this electric rush of clattering sound was commensurate with the ground he had lost by it, and Bertha came in for her share of this vexation. He was now put at a fresh disadvantage. How could he ever succeed in making Bertha believe that a person who laughed immoderately was serious? Under the shadow of this laugh all his ensuing acts or words must toil, discredited in advance.

Desperately ignoring accidents, Tarr went back beyond his first explosion, and attacked its cause—indicting Bertha, more or less, as responsible for the disturbance.

He sat down squarely in front of her, hardly breathed from his paroxysm, getting himself launched without transition: by rapid plunging from one state to another he hoped to take the wind out of the laugh’s sails: his irresponsible shout should be left towering, spectral but becalmed, behind.

‘I don’t know from which side to approach you Bertha: frequently you complain of my being thoughtless and spoilt: but your uncorked solemnity is far more frivolous than anything I can manage. Excuse me, naturally, for speaking in this way. Won’t you come down from your pedestal just for a few minutes?’ And he ‘sketched’ a gesture, as
though offering the lady, about to step off her precipitous pedestal, his hand.

‘My dear child I feel far from being on any pedestal, there’s too little of the pedestal if anything about me. Really Sorbert’ (she leant towards him with an abortive movement as though to take his hand) ‘I
am
your friend—
believe me!
’ (Last words very quick, with nod of head and blink of eyes.) ‘You worry yourself far too much, please don’t do so. You are in no way bound to me, if you think we should part—
let us part!
Yes, let us part. By all means let us part!’

The ‘let us part!’ was precipitate, strenuous-prussian, almost truculent.

Tarr thought:—‘Is it cunning, stupidity, is she a screw loose, or what?’

She took up the tale again, unexpectedly, and she had rapidly shunted on to another track of generosity:—

‘But I agree, let us be franker, Sorbert. We waste too much time talking, talking. You are different to-day Sorbert—what is it? If you have met somebody else—.’

Sorbert looked at her in dumb expostulation. Then he said:

‘If I had I’d tell you. There is besides
nobody else
to meet, you are unique! Really. Unique.’

‘Someone’s been saying something to you—.’

‘No. I’ve been saying something to somebody else. But it’s the same thing. It’s no use. I might as well keep my mouth shut.’

With half-incredulous, musing, glimmering stare she drew in her horns.

Tarr meditated. ‘This I should have foreseen. I am asking her for something that she sees no reason to give up. Next her beastly Geschmack
*
for me it is the most valuable thing the poor girl possesses. It is indissolubly mixed up with the Geschmack. The poor heightened self she laces herself into is the only consolation for
me
and all the troubles brought down on her by a person of my order. But I ask her brutally to “come down from her pedestal.” (I owe even a good deal to that pedestal, I expect, as regards her Geschmack in the first place): this blessed protection given her by nature I, a minute or two before leaving her, make a last inept attempt to capture or destroy. What more natural than that her good sense should be contemptuous and indignant? It is only in defence of this ridiculous sentimentality that she has ever shown
her teeth. This invaluable illusion has enabled her to bear things, so long: now it stands ready with redskin impassibility
*
to manœuvre her over the falls or rapids of Parting. The scientific thing to do, I suppose, with my liberal intentions, would be to flatter and enhance in every way this idea of herself. She should be given some final and extraordinary opportunity of being “noble.” ’

He looked up at her a moment, in search of inspiration.

‘I must not be too vain—I exaggerate the gravity of the hit. As to my attempted rape of her fairy drapery, there are two sides to that: consider how I square up when she shows signs of annexing
my
illusion! We are really the whole time playing a game of grabs and dashes
*
at each other’s magic vestment of imagination. Only hers makes her very fond of me, whereas mine makes me see anyone but her. That’s the difference. Perhaps this is why I have not been more energetic in my prosecution of the game, and have allowed her to remain in her savage semi-naked state of pristine balderdash. Why has she never tried to modify herself in direction of my “taste”? Is it on account of her not daring to leave this protective fanciful self, while I still kept all
my
weapons? Then her initiative. She does nothing it is the man’s place to do: she remains “woman” as she would say. Only she is so intensely alive in her passivity, so maelstrom-like in her surrender, so exclusive in her sacrifice, that very little remains to be done. Really with Bertha the man’s position is a mere sinecure.’

As a cover for reflection he set himself to finish lunch. The strawberries were devoured mechanically, with un-hungry itch to clear the plate: he was a conscientious automaton, restless if any of the little red balls still remained in front of it.

Bertha’s eyes sought to waft her out of this Present, but they had broken down, depositing her somewhere halfway down the avenue so to speak.

Tarr got up, a released puppet, and walked to the cloth-covered box where he had left his hat and stick. Then he returned in some way dutifully and obediently to the same seat, sat there for a minute, hat on knee. He had gone over and taken it up without thinking: he only realized, once back, what the action signified. Nothing was settled, he had so far done more harm than good. The presence of the hat and stick on his knees, however, was like the holding open of the front door already. Anything said with them there could only be like words said as an afterthought, upon the threshold. It was as though, hat on
head, he were standing with his hand on the door knob, about to add some trifle to a thing already settled.

He got up, walked back to where he had picked up the hat and stick, placed them as they were before, then returned to the window.

What should be done now? He seemed to have played all his cards. All the steps that had suggested themselves to him had now been taken. But should there be some still in reserve, that passive pose of Bertha’s was not encouraging. It had lately withstood stoically a good deal, and was quite ready to absorb still more. There was something almost pugnacious in so much resignation.

But when she looked up at him there was no sign of combat. She appeared adjusted to something simple again, for this critical departure, by some fluke of a word. For the second time that day she had jumped out of her skin.

Her heart beat in a delicate exhausted way, her eyelids became moistened underneath, as she turned to her unusual fiancé. They had wandered, she felt, into a drift of silence that hid a novel and unpleasant prospect at the end of it. Suddenly it seemed charged with some alarming fancy that she could not grasp. There was something more unusual than her fiancé.—But the circular storm, in her case, was returning.

‘Well Sorbert?’

‘Well. What is it?’

‘Why don’t you go? I thought you’d gone. It seems so funny to see you standing there—what are you staring at me for?’

‘Oh a cat may look at a king
*
I suppose, still.’

She looked down with a wild demureness, her head on one side.

Her mouth felt at some distance from her brain: her voice stood on tip-toe like a dwarf to speak. She became very much impressed by her voice, and was rather afraid to say anything more. Had she fainted? Sorbert appeared to her as a stranger, hat in hand, the black stubble on his chin and his brown neck repelled her like the symptoms of a disease. She noticed something criminal and quick in his eyes: she became nervous, as though she had admitted somebody too trustingly to her flat. This fancy played upon her hysteria: she really wished very much that he would go.

‘Why don’t you go?’ she repeated, in a matter-of-fact way, looking down.

Tarr remained silent, seemingly determined not to answer. Meantime, he looked at her with a doubtful dislike.

What is
love
? he began reasoning. It is either
possession
or a possessive madness. In the case of men and women, it is the obsession of a personality. He had been endowed with the power of awaking love in her, it was fair to assume. He had something to accuse himself of. He had been
afraid of giving up
or repudiating this particular madness. Yet why accuse himself? How could he accuse himself of an instinct? To give up another person’s love is a mild suicide. Then his tenderness for Bertha was due to her having purloined some part of himself, and covered herself superficially with it as a shield. Her skin at least was Tarr. She had captured a living piece of him and held it as a hostage. She was rapidly transforming herself, too, into a slavish dependency: she worked with all the hypocrisy of a great instinct.

People can wound by loving he said to himself (he was of course accusing her): the sympathy of this affection is interpenetrative. Love performs its natural miracle, and the people that love us become part of us; it is a dismemberment to cast them off. Our own blood flows out after them when they go.

Or love was a malady, Tarr continued: it was dangerous to live with those consumed by it. He felt an uneasiness: might not a wasting and restlessness now ensue? It would not, if he were infected, be recognizable as
love
. Perhaps he had already got it slightly: that might account for his hanging about her. He evidently was suffering from something that came from Bertha, maybe it was that.

Everybody, however, all personality was catching: we all are sicknesses for each other, he reasoned. Such contact as he had had with Bertha was
particularly
risky that was all. The photographs at which he had just been looking displayed an unpleasant solidarity. Was it necessary to allege ‘love’ at all however—in his case the word was superfluous. The fact was before him.

He felt suddenly despondent and afraid of the future: he had fallen beneath a more immediate infection.

He looked attentively round the room. Already his memory ached. She had loved him with all this: he had been loved with the plaster cast of Beethoven, this gentle girl had attacked him with the Klingers, had ambushed him from the Breton
*
jars, in a funny superficial absorbing way. Her madness had muddled everything with his ideal existence. This was not he told himself like leaving an ordinary room in which
you had spent pleasant hours and would regret, you would owe nothing to that, and it could not pursue you with images of wrong. This room he was wronging, and he left it in a different way. She seemed, too, so humble in it, or through it—the appeal of the
little
again: if he could only escape from scale! The price of preoccupation with the large was this perpetual danger from the
little
. Oh dear, Tarr wished he could look coldly upon mere littleness, and not fall so easily victim to it. Oh how necessary brutality was to him, he was so unprotected against all that was little! As to love, it was so much too new to him. He was not inoculated enough with love.